hkcharlie, I know it’s been a while but I’ve got a few moments to revisit this plugin and wanted to see if you had any ideas about the best way to implement what you want…

So, currently, there are no options offered by the plugin – it just does what it does. If I do implement an up-down choice, I’ll have to do so with an admin option somewhere. Now, this could be in a number of places. It could be a global option for the entire BuddyPress instance (i.e. all group activity propagates just one way or the other across the whole site) or it could be at the level of an individual group (i.e. each group shows activity either above it or below it in the hierarchy).

Do you see a need to mix propagation directions? Or do you think a global option the most likely use case?

To have both directions available per group could get confusing and tricky to administer, but I don’t think it would create recursive loops because each group would just pull in all activity from the direction specified, regardless of the settings of the groups above or below it in the hierarchy. This may, of course, be contrary to the intention of those groups… Think I’ll leave that conundrum for now!

Okay, I’ll start with a global option and see where things go from there.

As appealing as the idea is, it’s unlikely to happen in the near future. At minimum, you’re talking about re-engineering the BP Group Hierarchy plugin. But it’s a bigger question than that, because what you’re talking about is really a taxonomy of groups – and they’re effectively synonyms. This has been puzzling the BP devs for a while now as well. See:

@hkcharlie just to let you know that the code has been written, but I am waiting for the next update to BP Group Hierarchy to release the update to this plugin so that the direction switching option gets added to BP Group Hierarchy’s settings screen.